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The Anglo-Saxons who conquered England in the 5th century set up a system of apartheid that enabled them to master and outbreed the native British majority, according to gene research.

In less than 15 generations, more than half of the population in England had the genes of the invaders, investigators say.

"The native Britons were genetically and culturally absorbed by the Anglo-Saxons over a period of as little as a few hundred years," says Dr Mark Thomas, a University College London biologist.

"An initially small invading Anglo-Saxon elite could have quickly established themselves by having more children who survived to adulthood, thanks to their military power and economic advantage.

"We believe that they also prevented the native British genes getting into the Anglo-Saxon population by restricting intermarriage in a system of apartheid that left the country culturally and genetically Germanised," he says.

"This is what we see today, a population of largely Germanic genetic origin, speaking a principally German language."

The Anglo-Saxons, Germanic tribes who lived in present-day Germany, northern Holland and Denmark, invaded Britain in 450 AD after the fall of the Roman empire.

They conquered England but were unable to penetrate far into the Celtic fringes of what are now Wales and Scotland. They coincidentally prompted an exodus of Britons to what is now Brittany, France.

The population of England at that time was probably around two million while the number of Anglo-Saxons was minute: the lowest estimate puts the number of migrants at less than 10,000 some 200 years after the invasion, although others put it at more than 100,000.

How could such a tiny minority have ruled a country so emphatically? How could it skirt assimilation with the native British majority and impose a language, laws, economy and culture whose stamp is visible today?

The answer, suggest Thomas and colleagues, is an "apartheid-like social structure" that enshrined Anglo-Saxons as the master and the native Britons (called "Welshmen", from the Germanic word for slave) as the servants.

Historical evidence

Evidence for this comes from ancient texts, including the laws of Ine, the late 7th century ruler of Wessex, an Anglo-Saxon kingdom in western England.

Ine set down payments of 'wergild', or blood money, that was payable to a family for the killing of one of its members in order to prevent a blood feud.

If an Anglo-Saxon was killed, the wergild was between two and five times more than the fine payable for the life of a "Welshman" of comparable status.

Burial sites also provide a pointer about economic and social disparity.

The skeletal remains of men believed to be Anglo-Saxons are often found alongside a weapon or other precious artefacts, whereas those of native Britons are usually weaponless and have only one or two objects.

In previous work, Thomas' team compared the gene pool among native, white Englishmen in central England today and counterparts in the ancestral lands of the Anglo-Saxons.

They found that the two groups shared between 50 and 100% of telltale variations in the male sex chromosome Y.

Genes to map growth and decline

In the latest research, he used computer simulations to try to explain how segregation would have enabled the Anglo-Saxons to flourish and the native Britons to decline.

The computer model uses various scenarios involving the size of the immigration influx, different ethnic intermarriage rates and the reproductive advantage of being Anglo-Saxon, with more wealth and resources.

Apartheid is best known today for the notorious racial segregation that prevailed in white-minority South Africa.

But the authors point out that there are many other examples in history, when conquerors or settlers used such controls to avoid assimilation, nurture their identity and maintain their political, military or economic supremacy over an ethnic majority.

By the time of King Alfred the Great in the 9th century, the differences in legal status between Anglo-Saxons and Britons had faded out altogether.

Two centuries later, the Normans invaded England and imposed their own apartheid, giving themselves higher legal status than the Britons and allowing Norman men to marry native women but preventing native men from marrying Norman women.